15 Interesting Stubbins Ffirth Facts

Just how crazy do you think a scientist can get? In this article titled 15 interesting Stubbins Ffirth facts, we are going to learn some bizarre facts about of the craziest scientists/doctors the world has ever known! So, what did he do? That is exactly what we are going to find out. Just a heads up – whatever he did was utterly gross and you are, by all means, going to feel sick when you read this article.

Interesting Stubbins Ffirth facts: 1- 8

1. Born in 1784, Stubbins Ffirth was an American trainee doctor. He died in 1820.

2. He came in focus after the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic that had hit Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and killed roughly 10% of the population. Philadelphia at that time had a population of 50,000.

3. A few years after the Yellow Fever outbreak, Ffirth joined University of Pennsylvania and started studying the disease.

4. He noted that the disease was far more widespread during the summer months and the number of Yellow Fever cases dropped significantly during the winter.

5. This finding led Ffirth to strongly believe that Yellow Fever was a result of stress caused by the heat of the summer months and that the disease was not at all contagious.

6. Ffirth wanted to establish that his theory was correct and in order to do so he started experimenting. The guinea pig for his experiments was none other than himself.

7. In an attempt to prove that Yellow Fever was not at all contagious, he started experimenting on himself during the next outbreak of the disease in 1802-1803

8. It was during this second outbreak that he started to bring himself in direct contact with the body fluids of the infected patients, especially of those who were in late stages of the disease.

Interesting Stubbins Ffirth Facts: 9-15

9. Of the many experiments he conducted on himself, one was that of making incisions on his skin (especially arms) and smearing the vomits of the infected people into those incisions.

10. When that failed to infect him, he resorted to pouring vomit of infected people onto his eyeballs. That too failed to infect him.

11. Next thing he did was to fry the vomit of infected people and inhale the fumes. That didn’t work either.

12. Next in line was that of drink the undiluted dark vomit of the patients. That was gross but he did that and surprisingly enough, nothing happened to him.

13. Finally when vomit failed to yield results he desired, he started smearing himself with urine, saliva and blood of the infected people. Results of the experiment? Nothing happened to him!

14. Based on his crazy experiments and the results derived, Stubbins declared that his hypothesis was absolutely correct and that Yellow Fever was not at all contagious.

15. Irrespective of the results of Stubbins’ experiments, he was wrong! Yellow Fever is highly contagious and is spread by mosquito bites. This however was proven by Carlos Finlay – a Cuban scientist, 60 years after the death of Stubbins. Later it was also found that Stubbins used body fluids of late-stage patients who were no longer contagious.

No doubt, Stubbins Ffirth became popular by the name ‘Vomit-Drinking Doctor‘.